Hobby-hacking Eric

2007-01-17

yaht latex now up to date with wiki

YAHT has two versions: a LaTeX one, which produces a nice PDF including margin notes, an index, etc; and a wiki(book) one, which provides an HTML view and instant editing.

The latex (darcs) version was lagging a bit behind the wiki one for a while, but it has now caught up. I'm quite pleased with the results. I have received 3 darcs patches so far, which may not be huge, but is still better than nothing. More importantly, I have observed that people still like going to the PDF version a lot, so we know that keeping that up to date is important. Having YAHT on the wiki has certainly been useful as well. In the two and half months since its wikification, you have not only corrected countless crappy-script-induced-deformations, over a dozen factual errors, and twice as many typos or spelling/grammatical errors. Good work, Haskellers!

Note also that keeping the LaTeX version up to date should now be a lot easier, thanks to (1) a cleaned up and less noisy conversion script (2) stupid darcs tricks. I've got three branches: the (noisy) auto-convered version (latex-to-darcs), a "production" version, which has less noise than the prior, and an MVS version, which pulls in changes from the wiki. The noisy version has some gunk from my scripts that I just have to revert. The MVS version has some changes which only affect noise (errors in where I put my tags, for example), but I can just record these as local patches. Now if somebody modifies the wiki, I just have to do:

mvs update
darcs whatsnew


This tells me right away if there any changes I need to incorporate in the latex version. We'll have to see how this turns out in practice, but for now it seems we have now averted the danger of forking the YAHT (whew!). As usual, you can either send me patches to the latex version (darcs get http://darcs.haskell.org/yaht) or just edit the wikibook.


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